"Traversing centuries and swathes of the globe, this moving, enlightening memoir by a Black British Vincentian explores identity and what it means to find and return home."
Beautifully personable, Alexis Keir’s Windward Family is a moving memoir with broad-stroke historic scope, painterly personal detail, and timely resonance as it shares the experiences of a Black British family of our times, alongside presenting accounts of historic figures. One of the author’s intentions was to “give voice to the ghosts of my ancestors”, and Windward Family does that with warmth and flair.
Born on the Caribbean island of St Vincent, and brought up in Luton, Keir didn’t return to his homeland for twenty years. This return was largely driven by a seminal period in New Zealand, where he witnessed “bi- and multi-culturalism supported in a way that did not chime with my Black British experience. I saw genuine attempts to achieve the empowerment of minority communities”. He left New Zealand feeling “ready to visit St Vincent again for the first time in twenty years”. In short, “It was time to go home”, though Keir was acutely aware that returning to St Vincent would be “a journey of fear and trepidation that also promised discovery”.
Traversing St Vincent, Luton, Texas, New Zealand and London (with St Vincent always having bone-deep presence), the author’s autobiographical narrative is interspersed with accounts of historic figures whose stories relate to the theme of identity, and to what it means to be of both the Caribbean and Britain. These include the boy who sparked this book, George Alexander Gratton. He was taken from St Vincent as a one-year-old and presented as a money-making sideshow attraction, with his vitiligo skin condition giving rise to him being known as the “Beautiful Spotted Boy”.
Fittingly and movingly, the “usual Vincentian way of saying goodbye” is “We coming back”, just as Windward Family shares the author’s enthralling journey to finding home, with a wonderful, pertinent story about the glorious, endangered St Vincent parrot leaving a lasting impression.
| Primary Genre | Biographies & Autobiographies |
| Other Genres: | |
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'It took two decades for me to go in search of the parts of myself I had left behind in the Caribbean. What ghosts were waiting for me there? There was a thick, black journal in my flat, stuffed with letters, postcards, handwritten notes, and diary entries. For the first time in years, I opened it.'
Twenty years after living there as a child, Alexis Keir returns to the Caribbean island of Saint Vincent. He is keen to uncover lost memories and rediscover old connections. But he also carries with him the childhood scars of being separated from his parents and put into uncaring hands.
Inspired by the embrace of his relatives in the Caribbean, Alexis begins to unravel the stories of others who left Saint Vincent, searching through diary pages and newspaper articles, shipping and hospital records, and faded photographs. He uncovers tales of exploitation, endeavour and bravery of those who had to find a home far away from where they were born. A child born with vitiligo, torn from his mother's arms to be exhibited as a showground attraction in England; a woman who, in the century before the Windrush generation, became one of the earliest Black nurses to be recorded as working in a London hospital; the young boy who became a footman in a Yorkshire stately home. And Alexis's mother, a student nurse who arrives in 1960s London, ready to start a new life in a cold, grey country - and the man from her island who she falls in love with. From the Caribbean to England, North America and New Zealand, from windswept islands to the cold streets of London, and spanning generations of travellers from the 19th century to the present, Windward Family takes you inside the beating heart of a Black British family, separated by thousands of miles but united by love, loss and belonging.
Windward Family features in the following genres: Biographies & Autobiographies, Memoirs, Social discrimination and social justice, Ethnic groups and multicultural studies, History of the Americas, European history, Biography: general, Biography, Literature and Literary studies, Social and ethical issues, Society and culture: general, Society and Social Sciences, Ethnic studies, Social groups, communities and identities, History, History and Archaeology, Star Books, Recommendations
Windward Family is available in Paperback
Windward Family was written by Alexis Keir and published by Thread an imprint of Octopus Publishing Group
Windward Family has 282 pages
£8.09
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